The Home Cinema 1440 - An Impressive Brute Force Solution for Living Room Projection

Typically the under $2000 range for home projectors has consisted of two classes of projectors, the entry level of the home theater class - projectors optimized for best possible picture, but primarily geared to be used in fully darkened rooms for movie viewing, but with enough brightness to tackle some sports and other HDTV with some ambient light present. That's not the Home Cinema 1440!

Then there are traditional HE - home entertainment projectors.  They are a somewhat brighter, typically even lower cost, but able to tackle more ambient light, but image processing remains very basic, no match in picture for the Home Theater projectors.

The Home Cinema 1440 projector is mostly "home entertainment" but what it has going for it is some rather dazzling brightness, I mean the kind typically found in a small auditorium, or large training room, not, until now - in the home.  In this case 4400 lumens maximum both color and white lumens (with a pretty impressive picture).  That is a rather incredible amount of brightness for the price.

I'm going to invest a few paragraphs here, to position this projector because Epson makes so many models.

In Epson's Home Cinema line-up, the HC1440 is the top of the line of these exceptionally bright new projector models.  We'll be reviewing in January/February time frame, the step down HC1040, which is a $900 projector by comparison, but still very bright, if not quite as bright.

The thing readers need to understand about Epson's projector strategy/line-up, is that for the most part, Epson seems to want to offer us one of everything.  Epson already sells far more different projector models than anyone else, one reason why they have over 40% of the North American market share despite more than 20 major competing manufacturers such as NEC, InFocus, Panasonic, Sony, Optoma, Viewsonic...   Not satisfied with entry level projectors on the home entertainment side, and serious ones on the home theater side, Epson is making a big push into the concept of selling projectors to people to use in rooms they would otherwise put in LCDTVs, because there haven't previously been projector suitable solutions.

Can't blame Epson.  Big is better, but most people have not had the option - until now, to put a projector in their favorite family or media room, due to lighting conditions.  And we're still talking one of the major advantages of projectors - huge image sizes.  Why settle for a "tiny" 70 inch LCDTV in your favorite room when you can enjoy 100, 110, 120... inch diagonal projection?